335 p. Linguistic authority, language ideology, and metaphor : the Czech orthography wars / by Neil Bermel.
This style, so unsettled, so alternately anxious or careless about its own linguistic authority, is extraordinarily circumlocutory and inefficient, and when it says: 'Let us not mince words here', the joke is obvious.
"When people are confronted with linguistic authority of various kinds, whether it's dictionaries or grammar books, the more conspiratorially minded may use that as evidence of some grand scheme, or something where people are pulling the strings behind the scenes and using language to do that," Mr. Zimmer said.
Some linguistic authorities, however, believe that the Teotihuacanos spoke a Totonacan language, similar to what was spoken by the inhabitants of central Veracruz.
The non-expert is able to refer to the species only by using the word with an attitude of linguistic deference to these experts, who become in effect linguistic authorities (Putnam 1975 and Burge 1979; see the entries on narrow mental content and externalism about mental content).
Though his voice now sounds frayed, he still brings linguistic and stylistic authority to his portrayal of Bluebeard.
But what matters is that his expansive intellect, linguistic range, cultural authority, organisational power and ability to see the interconnectedness as well as the variousness of the way people live through time, made him a great historian, in a great European tradition.
Robin Lakoff, a Brooklyn-born linguist who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, said that she despised the word, but that enforcing linguistic change through authority "almost never works," echoing comments from some New Yorkers who believed a ban would only serve to heighten the word's power.
Evan Jenkins, a retired editor at The New York Times who was an authority on the linguistic bugbears — "gantlet" versus "gauntlet," "flaunt" versus "flout" — that keep reporters, editors and many others awake at night, died yesterday at his home in Huntington, N.Y.
"The currency of the disliked use in America is not clear to me, but the problem hardly arises in Britain," notes Fowler's Modern English Usage, the venerable authority for British linguistic propriety.
David Crystal, a language expert who advised the Globe on Romeo and Juliet, believes that you can use linguistic detection to establish, with some authority, the likely sound of Shakespeare's English.
